The Dispossessed hc-1

by Ursula Le Guin

  Anarres had no flag to wave, but among the placards proclaiming the general strike, and the blue and white banners of the Syndicalists and the Socialist Workers, there were many homemade signs showing the green Circle of Life, the old symbol of the Odonian Movement of two hundred years before. All the flags and signs shone bravely in the sunlight.

  It was good to be outside, after the rooms with locked doors, the hiding places. It was good to be walking, swinging his arms, breathing the clear air of a spring morning. To be among so many people, so immense a crowd, thousands marching together, filling all the side streets as well as the broad thoroughfare down which they marched, was frightening, but it was exhilarating too. When they sang, both the exhilaration and the fear became a blind exaltation; he eyes filled with tears. It was deep, in the deep streets, softened by open air and by distances, indistinct, overwhelming, that lifting up of thousands of voices in one song. The singing of the front of the march, far away up the street, and of the endless crowds coming on behind, was put out of phase by the distance the sound must travel, so that the melody seemed always to be lagging and catching up with itself, like a canon, and all the parts of the song were being sung at one time, in the same moment, though each singer sang the tune as a line from beginning to end.

  He did not know their songs, and only listened and was borne along on the music, until from up front there came sweeping back wave by wave down the great slow-moving river of people a tune he knew. He lifted his head and sang it with them, in his own language as he had learned it: the Hymn of the Insurrection. It had been sung in these streets, in this same street, two hundred years ago, by these people, his people.

  O eastern light, awaken Those who have slept! The darkness will be broken, The promise kept.

  They fell silent in the ranks around Shevek to hear him, and he sang aloud, smiling, walking forward with them.

  There might have been a hundred thousand human beings in Capitol Square, or twice that many. The individuals, like the particles of atomic physics, could not be counted, nor their positions ascertained, nor their behavior predicted. And yet, as a mass, that enormous mass did what it had been expected to do by the organizers of the strike: it gathered, marched in order, sang, filled Capitol Square and all the streets around, stood in its numberlessness restless yet patient in the bright noon listening to the speakers, whose single voices, erratically amplified, clapped and echoed off the sunlit facades of the Senate and the Directorate, rattled and hissed over the continuous, soft, vast murmur of the crowd itself.

  There were more people standing here in the Square than lived in all Abbenay, Shevek thought, but the thought was meaningless, an attempt to quantify direct experience. He stood with Maedda and the others on the steps of the Directorate, in front of the columns and the tall bronze doors, and looked out over the tremulous, somber field of faces, and listened as they listened to the speakers: not hearing and understanding in the sense in which the individual rational mind perceives and understands, but rather as one looks at, listens to one’s own thoughts, or as a thought perceives and understands the self. When he spoke, speaking was little different from listening. No conscious will of his own moved him, no self-consciousness was in him. The multiple echoes of his voice from distant loudspeakers and the stone fronts of the massive buildings, however, distracted him a little, making him hesitate at times and speak very slowly. But he never hesitated for words. He spoke their mind, their being, in their language, though he said no more than he had said out of his own isolation, out of the center of his own being, a long time ago.

  “It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.

  “I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise that we made two hundred years ago in this city — the promise kept. We have kept it, on Anarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

  As he finished speaking the clattering racket of police helicopters drawing near began to drown out his voice.

  He stood back from the microphones and looked upward, squinting into the sun. As many of the crowd did so the movement of their heads and hands was like the passage of wind over a sunlit field of grain.

  The noise of the rotating vanes of the machines in the huge stone box of Capitol Square was intolerable, a clacking and yapping like the voice of a monstrous robot. It drowned out the chatter of the machine guns fired from the helicopters. Even as the crowd noise rose up in tumult the clack of the helicopters was still audible through it, the mindless yell of weaponry, the meaningless word.

  The helicopter fire centered on the people who stood on or nearest the steps of the Directorate. The columned portico of the building offered immediate refuge to those on the steps, and within moments it was jammed solid. The noise of the crowd, as people pressed in panic toward the eight streets that led out of Capitol Square, rose up into a wailing like a great wind. The helicopters were close overhead, but there was no telling whether they had ceased firing or were still firing; the dead and wounded in the crowd were too close pressed to fall.

  The bronze-sheathed doors of the Directorate gave with a crash that no one heard. People pressed and trampled toward them to get to shelter, out from under the metal rain. They pushed by hundreds into the high halls of marble, some cowering down to hide in the first refuge they saw, others pushing on to find a way through the building and out the back, others staying to wreck what they could until the soldiers came. When they came, marching in their neat black coats up the steps among dead and dying men and women, they found on the high, grey, polished wall of the great foyer a word written at the height of a man’s eyes, in broad smears of blood: DOWN.

  They shot the dead man who lay nearest the word, and later on when the Directorate was restored to order the word was washed off the wall with water, soap, and rags, but it remained; it had been spoken; it had meaning.

  He realized it was impossible to go any farther with his companion, who was getting weak, beginning to stumble. There was nowhere to go, except away from Capitol Square. There was nowhere to stop, either. The crowd had twice rallied in Mesee Boulevard, trying to present a front to the police, but the army’s armored cars came behind, the police and drove the people forward, towards Old Town. The blackcoats had not fired either time, though the noise of guns could be heard on other streets. The clacking helicopters cruised up and down above the streets; one› could not get out from under them.

  His companion was breathing in sobs, gulping for air as! he struggled along. Shevek had been half-carrying him for several blocks, and they were now far behind the main, mass of the crowd. There was no use try
ing to catch up. “Here, sit down here,” he told the man, and helped him toi sit down on the top step of a basement entry to some kind of warehouse, across the shuttered windows of which the word STRIKE was chalked in huge letters. He went down, to the basement door and tried it; it was locked. All doors, were locked. Property was private. He took a piece of paving stone that had come loose from a corner of the steps and smashed the hasp and padlock off the door; working neither furtively nor vindictively, but with the assurance of one unlocking his own front door. He looked in. The basement was full of crates and empty of people. Ha helped his companion down the steps, shut the door behind them, and said, “Sit here, lie down if you want I’ll see if there’s water.”

  The place, evidently a chemical warehouse, had a row of washtubs as well as a hose system for fires. Shevek’s companion had fainted by the time he got back to him. He took the opportunity to wash the man’s hand with a trickle from the hose and to get a look at his wound. It was worse than he had thought More then one bullet must have struck it, tearing two fingers off and mangling the palm and wrist. Shards of splintered bone stuck out like toothpicks. The man had been standing near Shevek and Maedda when the helicopters began firing and, hit, had lurched against Shevek, grabbing at him for support.

  Shevek had kept an arm around him all through the escape through the Directorate; two could keep afoot better than one in the first wild press.

  He did what he could to stop the bleeding with a tourniquet and to bandage, or at least cover, the destroyed hand, and he got the man to drink some water. He did not know his name; by his white armband he was a Socialist Worker; he looked to be about Shevek’s age, forty, or a little older.

  At the milk in Southwest Shevek had seen men hurt much worse than this in accidents and had learned that people may endure and survive incredibly much in the way of gross injury and pain. But there they had been. looked after. There had been a surgeon to amputate, plasma to compensate blood loss, a bed to lie down in.

  He sat down on the floor beside the man, who now lay semiconscious in shock, and looked around at the stacks of crates, the long dark alleys between them, the whitish gleam of daylight from the barred window slits along the front wall, the white streaks of saltpeter on the ceiling, the tracks of workmen’s boots and dolly wheels on the dusty cement floor. One hour hundreds of thousands of people singing under the open sky; the next hour two men’ hiding in a basement.

  “You are contemptible,” Shevek said in Pravic to his companion. “You cannot keep doors open. You will never be free.” He felt the man’s forehead gently; it was cold and sweaty. He loosened the tourniquet for a while, then got up, crossed the murky basement to the door, and went up onto the street. The fleet of armored cars had passed. A very few stragglers of the demonstration went by, hurrying, their heads down, in enemy territory. Shevek tried to stop two; a third finally halted for him. “I need a doctor, there is a man hurt Can you send a doctor back here?”

  “Better get him out.”

  “Help me carry him.”

  The man hurried on. “They coming through here,” he called back over his shoulder. “You better get out.”

  No one else came by, and presently Shevek saw a line of blackcoats far down the street He went back down into the basement, shut tbe door, returned to the wounded man’s side, sat down on the dusty floor. “Hell,” he said.

  After a while he took the little notebook out of his shirt pocket and began to study it.

  In the afternoon, when be cautiously looked outside, he saw an armored car stationed across the street and two others slewed across the street at the crossing. That explained the shouts he had been hearing: it would be soldiers giving orders to each other.

  Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains… and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust “You call that organization?” he had inquired. “You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency — a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing?” This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and the weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerillas, organized from below, self-disciplined. “But that only works when the people think they’re fighting for something of their own — you know, their homes, or some notion or other,” the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument. He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men, with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he Still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.

  He occasionally spoke to his companion, too, as it got darker. The man was lying now with his eyes open, and he moaned a couple of times in a way that touched Shevek, a childish, patient sort of moan. He had made a gallant effort to keep up and keep going, all the time they were In the first panic of the crowd forcing into and through the Directorate, and running, and then walking towards Old Town; he had held the hurt hand under his coat, pressed against his side, and had done his best to keep going and not to hold Shevek back. The second time he moaned, Shevek took his good hand and whispered, “Don’t, don’t. Be quiet, brother,” only because he could not bear to hear the man’s pain and not be able to do anything for him. The man probably thought he meant he should be quiet lest be give them away to the police, for he nodded weakly and shut his lips together.

  The two of them endured there three nights. During all that time there was sporadic fighting in the warehouse district, and the army blockade remained across that block of Mesee Boulevard. The fighting never came very close to it, and it was strongly manned, so the men in hiding had no chance to get out without surrendering themselves. Once when his companion was awake Shevek asked him, “’If we went out to the police what would they do with us?”

  The man smiled and whispered, “Shoot us.”

  As there had been scattered gunfire around, near and far, for hours, and an occasional solid explosion, and the clacking of the helicopters, his opinion seemed well founded. The reason for his smile was less clear.

  He died of loss of blood that night, while they lay side by side for warmth on the mattress Shevek had made from packing-crate straw. He was already stiff when Shevek woke, and sat up, and listened to the silence in the great dark basement and outside on the street and in all the city, a silence of death.

  Chapter 10

  “Nothing you can do with Southwest,” said the driver, “but get across it.”

  Rail lines in Southwest ran for the most part on embankments a meter or more above the plain. There was less dust drift on an elevated roadbed, and it gave travelers a good view of desolation.

  Southwest was the only one of the eight Divisions of Anarres that lacked any major body of water. Marshes were formed by polar melt in summer in the far south; towards the equator there were only shallow alkaline lakes in vast salt pans. There were no mountains; every hundred kilometers or so a chain of hills ran north-south, barren, cracked, weathered into cliffs and pinnacles, They were streaked with violet and red, and on cliff faces the rockmoss, a plant that lived in any extreme of heat, cold, aridity, and wind, grew in bold verticals of grey-green, making a plaid with the striations of the sandstone. There was no other color in the landscape but dun, fading to whitish where salt pans lay half covered with sand. Rare thunderclouds moved over the plains, vivid white in the purplish sky.
They cast no ram, only shadows. The embankment and the glittering rails ran straight behind the truck train to the end of sight and straight before it to the end of sight.

  His companion did not answer, having fallen asleep. His head jiggled to the vibration of the engine. His hands, work-hard and blackened by frostbite, lay loose on his thighs; his face in relaxation was lined and sad. He had hitched the ride in Copper Mountain, and since there were no other passengers the driver had asked him to ride in the cab for company. He had gone to sleep at once. The driver glanced at him from time to time with disappointment but sympathy. He had seen so many worn-out people in the last years that it seemed the normal condition to him.

  Late in the long afternoon the man woke up, and after staring out at the desert a while he asked, “You always do this run alone?”

  “Last three, four years.”

  “Ever break down out here?”

  “Couple of times. Plenty of rations and water in the locker. You hungry, by the way?”